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Monday, January 23, 2012

Kaiji Part 3 Chapter 29

All right, we're finally up to bat for the Kaiji team! Let's get ready for some releases of Volume 4!! Also, from now on, rather than calling it Kaiji Part 1 and Part 3 and so on, I'll just be shortening it to "MKaiji" for Part 1 (Mokushiroku Kaiji), and likewise "DKaiji" for Part 3, just for this blog. That way we won't have to type out "Mokushiroku" every time we want to talk about the first one.

Thanks to Biggums for the excellent cleaning and re-cleaning, Kazuhiko for the excellent typesetting and re-typesetting, and to the Project Bite Me team for letting us pick up where they left off!

"The Ninth Match, where Kaiji has no choice but to win!!"

﻿Well, I've been keeping up with PBM's scans of the series, so I don't really have a lot to say about this chapter, since it's mostly just about Kaiji's strategy of having a 6-8-9 sou wait to catch the Prez by suprise. So this blog post is mostly going to be about the differences between our scans and that of PBM before us.

First off, I don't use quite as big of words in my translations as you're used to from Momo, PBM's translator. When a character like Kaiji or Muraoka is speaking, I like to have them use pretty common language that someone could come up with on the spot, rather than wording that sounds rehearsed and well-written. With the narrator, I can go all-out with long, flowing sentences with big words that I need to look up, but I always put dramatic wording before particularly literary wording in that part. There comes a time, though, when you can't just slave over every single word and make sure the work is at the level of The Great Gatsby; you've gotta release the chapter, because there's a whole ton of volumes still left to do. So I feel like we'll be doing faster releases for sure; whether their quality is better is up to you to decide.

As for the editing and such, both Biggums and Kazuhiko were on the PBM team before this, so this chapter probably looks a lot like the releases from PBM did, at least in terms of what is cleaned, and what fonts are used. But over time, I expect that we'll start to develop our own style... I'm always trying to better my translations while still keeping them easy to read and understand, and I feel like things can only go up from here. So keep an eye out for more DKaiji; we're rushing forwards towards the finish line!!

I too prefer this style of translation, just be sure to make Muraoka sound goofy "Kaiji my boy, how exquisite, what a splendid solution!" (look at me telling you what to do, who am I to give you orders?)

"First off, I don't use quite as big of words in my translations as you're used to from Momo, PBM's translator. When a character like Kaiji or Muraoka is speaking, I like to have them use pretty common language that someone could come up with on the spot, rather than wording that sounds rehearsed and well-written. With the narrator, I can go all-out with long, flowing sentences with big words that I need to look up, but I always put dramatic wording before particularly literary wording in that part. There comes a time, though, when you can't just slave over every single word and make sure the work is at the level of The Great Gatsby; you've gotta release the chapter, because there's a whole ton of volumes still left to do. So I feel like we'll be doing faster releases for sure; whether their quality is better is up to you to decide."